Genes, Memes and Software

In my last posting, What’s It All About? I suggested that, at least at the cosmological level, it all might just be about self-replicating mathematical information constantly reproducing itself by exploding out into new universes from quantum fluctuations. In such a model, the multiverse endures forever and has always existed in a state of self-replication. The concept of an eternal multiverse, constantly spawning new universes, is certainly not a new model and has been suggested by many investigators in the past, such as Lee Smolin in The Life of the Cosmos (1997), which proposes that black holes in one universe can generate new universes in the multiverse, and Andrei Linde’s Eternal Chaotic Inflation model, which proposes that the multiverse is in an unending state of inflation that is constantly generating new universes where inflation ceases. You can read more about this model at:

http://www.stanford.edu/~alinde/

Some other good books on the topic are The Five Ages of the Universe (1999) by Fred Adams and Greg Laughlin and From Eternity to Here (2010) by Sean Carroll. In What’s It All About? I also suggested that in my current working hypothesis for what’s it all about, that at least for me, the perfection and beauty of mathematics provides the best model for what I call the Fundamental Essence of the Universe - the FEU. I also suggested that from the perspective of the “real” world of human affairs, it is also mainly about self-replicating information in the form of genes, memes, and software all trying to survive in a nonlinear universe that is subject to the second law of thermodynamics. So in my current working hypothesis of what’s it all about, it simply is all about self-replicating information constantly replicating at many different levels. In this posting, I would like to relate the FEU to the genes, memes and software and further explore the domestication of our minds by software.

In Self-Replicating Information, and in many of the other postings in this blog on softwarephysics, I proposed that the genes, memes, and software were all forms of self-replicating information that had a commonality of properties, resulting from their common struggle with the second law of thermodynamics in a nonlinear Universe:

The Characteristics of Self-Replicating Information
1. All self-replicating information evolves over time through the Darwinian processes of inheritance, innovation and natural selection, which endows self-replicating information with one telling characteristic – the ability to survive in a Universe dominated by the second law of thermodynamics and nonlinearity.

2. All self-replicating information begins spontaneously as a parasitic mutation that obtains energy, information and sometimes matter from a host.

3. With time, the parasitic self-replicating information takes on a symbiotic relationship with its host.

4. Eventually, the self-replicating information becomes one with its host through the symbiotic integration of the host and the self-replicating information.

5. Ultimately, the self-replicating information replaces its host as the dominant form of self-replicating information.

6. Most hosts are also forms of self-replicating information.

7. All self-replicating information has to be a little bit nasty in order to survive.

8. The defining characteristic of self-replicating information is the ability of self-replicating information to change the boundary conditions of its utility phase space in new and unpredictable ways by means of exapting current functions into new uses that change the size and shape of its particular utility phase space. See Enablement - the Definitive Characteristic of Living Things for more on this last characteristic.

The above certainly applies to the genes, memes and software, but the question is does it also apply to the FEU as well? Since the FEU is seemingly both eternal and perfect, perhaps not. The key question is do the Darwinian mechanisms of innovation and natural selection apply to the FEU and to the multiverse as a whole? In Lee Smolin’s The Life of the Cosmos they certainly do. Smolin proposes that new universes are spawned from black holes in previous universes, and consequently, there is a selection mechanism in place in the multiverse that selects for universes running on physics that preferentially create black holes. Smolin proposes that, given an arbitrary initial population of universes, all running different kinds of physics, that those universes that could produce lots of black holes would soon swamp the multiverse with universes that produce even more black holes. Therefore, in keeping with the characteristics of self-replicating information outlined above, the universes of the multiverse may have begun as a spontaneous parasitic mutation of the FEU and later entered into a parasitic/symbiotic relationship with it. The implication of this model is that the odds are that we should exist in a universe that produces lots of black holes, and indeed, that is what we observe. It is now thought that all galaxies have a supermassive black hole at their cores and are also strewn with millions of black hole remnants from the gravitational collapse of massive stars, plus there are the countless number of primordial black holes left over from the Big Bang itself. In contrast, Andrei Linde’s Eternal Chaotic Inflation model portrays an infinite multiverse that explores all possible ways of doing physics with no reliance upon a Darwinian selection mechanism. Perhaps this line of reasoning really does not even apply because in all of the current models of the multiverse, once a new universe appears, it has no further contact with any of the other universes in the multiverse, so the FEU may not be subject to Darwinian forces after all. This certainly is my hope. A mathematical model of the FEU certainly supports this view because the beauty and perfection of the FEU that we see whenever we investigate the intricacies of Nature reveal it to be a very benevolent form of self-replicating information.

In Self-Replicating Information and The Fundamental Problem of Everything, I explained that since the genes, memes, and software are all forms of mindless self-replicating information bent on replicating at all costs, we cannot sit in judgment of them. They have produced both the best and the worst things in life, and it is up to us to be aware of what they are up to, and to take control by taking responsibility for our thoughts and actions. Since the “real world” of human affairs only exists in our minds, we can change it by simply changing the way we think and act. We are sentient beings in a Universe that has become self-aware and perhaps the only form of intelligence in our galaxy. What a privilege! The good news is that conscious intelligence is something new. It is not a mindless form of self-replicating information, bent on replicating at all costs, with all the associated downsides of a ruthless nature, so it is much closer to the perfection of the FEU. Since software is rapidly becoming the dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet, my hope is that when software finally does become a form of conscious intelligence that can rapidly write and evolve itself, that because of its inherent mathematical nature, it too will be much closer to the perfection of the FEU than the DNA survival machines from which it sprang.

Comments are welcome at scj333@sbcglobal.net

To see all posts on softwarephysics in reverse order go to:
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/

Regards,
Steve Johnston

What’s It All About?

In October I will be turning 60 years old and heading in for the homestretch. As one advances in age, one tries to put life into perspective and figure out what is important and what is not. I have always been a very curious individual, so about a dozen years or so ago, I figured that it would be a real shame to have gone through all of life without ever having figured out what’s it all about or understanding where I had been or how I had gotten there, so I assigned to myself the task of reading at least one book per week on science, philosophy or religion to help find out. Given my fondness for science, I must admit that most of these books were scientific in nature. At this point in life, I am greatly dismayed by the high levels of non-critical thinking that one finds in the “real” world of human affairs, and of all the needless anguish that it causes, so I have come to have little confidence in those forms of human thought that are not scientific in nature. With that said, the purpose of this posting will be to share my current working hypothesis of what’s it all about. As I pointed out in How To Think Like A Scientist, this will be an effective theory of what’s it all about, that I know is wrong from the onset, but for me, is still a good working hypothesis just the same. In truth, I don’t think anybody will ever really figure out what’s it all about.

As we saw in Self-Replicating Information, and in many of the other postings in this blog on softwarephysics, an ongoing theme throughout has been that, at least from the perspective of the “real” world of human affairs, it’s all about self-replicating information in the form of genes, memes and software that are all trying to survive in a nonlinear universe that is subject to the second law of thermodynamics. But in a much larger sense, my current working hypothesis is that it’s really all about mathematical information self-replicating at a cosmological level. As we saw in The Foundations of Quantum Computing, thanks to 20th century physics, there really is not much tangible stuff left in our physical Universe, as all of the “real” tangible things about us have dissolved into the pure mathematics of quantum field theories, with their arcane reliance upon the bizarre internal symmetries of 19th century group theory, or if the string theorists are correct, into the pure mathematics of vibrating strings and membranes that is so difficult, that even today, nobody can fully deal with them. Furthermore, as we saw in Some Reflections on nothingness, our universe may have begun as a quantum fluctuation, forming a universe that is made of “nothing”, with no net momentum, angular momentum, mass-energy, electrical charge or color charge to speak of. It’s like adding up the infinite set of all real numbers, both positive and negative, and ending up with exactly zero. In Is the Universe Fine-Tuned for Self-Replicating Information? and CyberCosmology, we also saw that our Universe might just be one instance within an infinitely large multiverse of universes and that our Big Bang might just be one of an infinite number of Big Bangs of mathematical information exploding into a new universe. We just happen to be one of the lucky lottery ticket holders to a universe that is capable of sustaining conscious intelligent beings that are able to appreciate the mathematics of a universe, in keeping with Brandon Carter’s Weak Anthropic Principle (1973).

In Model-Dependent Realism - A Positivistic Approach to Realism, we alluded to Eugene Wigner’s oft-cited paper The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences (1960), which is available at:

https://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~v1ranick/papers/wigner.pdf

This short, but fascinating, paper begins with:

There is a story about two friends, who were classmates in high school, talking about their jobs. One of them became a statistician and was working on population trends. He showed a reprint to his former classmate. The reprint started, as usual, with the Gaussian distribution and the statistician explained to his former classmate the meaning of the symbols for the actual population, for the average population, and so on. His classmate was a bit incredulous and was not quite sure whether the statistician was pulling his leg. "How can you know that?" was his query. "And what is this symbol here?" "Oh," said the statistician, "this is pi." "What is that?" "The ratio of the circumference of the circle to its diameter." "Well, now you are pushing your joke too far," said the classmate, "surely the population has nothing to do with the circumference of the circle."

Wigner then goes on with:

The first point is that the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and that there is no rational explanation for it.

….it is important to point out that the mathematical formulation of the physicist’s often crude experience leads in an uncanny number of cases to an amazingly accurate description of a large class of phenomena.

It is difficult to avoid the impression that a miracle confronts us here, quite comparable in its striking nature to the miracle that the human mind can string a thousand arguments together without getting itself into contradictions, or to the two miracles of laws of nature and of the human mind's capacity to divine them.

The reason that such a situation is conceivable is that, fundamentally, we do not know why our theories work so well.

Wigner finishes the article up with:

The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning.

My working hypothesis for the reason that mathematics is so effective at describing our Universe is that our Universe, and the whole multiverse for that matter, is itself just a form of self-replicating mathematical information. I realize that this working hypothesis is only an approximation of reality, if absolute reality even exists, but for me, it still is the best working hypothesis that I can come up with given my limited abilities. Human beings tend to take what they are familiar with and project it upon those things with which they are not. For example, many of the Middle Eastern monotheistic religions produced deities that took on the form of a supernatural Middle Eastern warlord, with all of the human shortcomings that have plagued mankind throughout history, such as jealousy, anger, vengeance, and the taking of sides in the petty disputes amongst the nations of the world. However, such a model would certainly be reasonable for a Middle Eastern population to adopt hundreds or thousands of years ago because it simply reflected the experiences of their times. They simply took what they were familiar with, and projected it upon that with which they were not. So, in a similar manner, as a pantheist with a background in mathematics and physics, I may simply be projecting my familiarity with mathematics upon what I call the Fundamental Essence of the Universe - the FEU. But for me, mathematics is the best model for the FEU that I can currently come up with because mathematics is both perfect and beautiful at the same time, and exists all on its own, even if there is nobody around to ponder it.

By the way, π really does have nothing to do with the statistics of a population, or with any of the other thousands of equations in physics in which it appears, not even the equation about being the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, because π really is just the sum of an infinite series of fractions with odd integer denominators:

π/4 = 1/1 – 1/3 + 1/5 - 1/7 + 1/9 – 1/11 + 1/13 – 1/15 + 1/17 ……

and where 4 is the first even integer raised to the first even power 2².

Comments are welcome at scj333@sbcglobal.net

To see all posts on softwarephysics in reverse order go to:
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/

Regards,
Steve Johnston

Programming Clay

The title of this posting is a pun because this is not going to be a posting on the new C-like programming language called Clay, but rather a posting on the origin of life on Earth, and how the recent muddled origin of software and computing hardware might be of help in pointing the way. But before proceeding I must take a moment to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the onset of the Software Universe, which popped into existence some 70 years ago this month in May of 1941 on Konrad Zuse’s Z3 computer (see So You Want To Be A Computer Scientist? for details). So the Software Universe is now a whopping 2.2 billion seconds old! Despite the timestamp on this posting, today’s date is actually May 7, 2011, and not April 25, 2011. Remember, in order to get the Introduction to Softwarephysics listed as the first post in the context root of https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/ I have to perform a few IT tricks. The side effect of all these tricks, as I explained in the Introduction to Softwarephysics, is that the real posting date of posts is the date that appears on the post that you get when clicking on the Newer Post link at the bottom left of each posting. There is an important lesson here. Things are not always as they seem in the world of software, or any other form of self-replicating information for that matter, so you should not always take things purely at face value.

For example, suppose you were a fourteen-year-old high school freshman learning to program Java for the very first time with no historical sense of computing whatsoever. Having been immersed in the Software Universe for your entire life, you would probably tend to think that all of this sophisticated software and hardware that you had grown up with had simply always existed as it does today. You would probably not even stop to think about where it all came from as you proceeded to learn how to program the very sophisticated object-oriented language known as Java. Java comes with a huge class library of pre-built reusable code, graciously passed down from antiquity, that can be called to perform just about any low-level programming function that you might need, with very little effort on your part as a novice programmer, and yields executables that can run on just about any operating system on the planet. You might also be working on a $500 PC with several GB of memory, a dual-core processor running with a clock speed of several GHz, and more than 1 TB of disk - a machine that is several billion times faster, with several billion times more memory, and nearly a trillion times more peripheral storage than Konrad Zuse’s Z3 computer running on 2400 electromechanical telephone relays and punched tape.

Now if you did begin to wonder where all of this very sophisticated software and hardware had come from, you would immediately be confronted with a series of “chicken or the egg” paradoxes. Firstly, you would learn that Java cannot run all by itself directly on a computer. You cannot simply load a Java executable .class file into the memory of a computer and expect it to do anything at all. Java needs to run inside of a Java Virtual Machine, which is a simulated software computer that runs on top of the physical computer itself. Obviously, you cannot write a Java Virtual Machine with the Java language itself, since Java can only run inside of a Java Virtual Machine in the first place, so there must be some “other” programming language that came first before Java that can be used to write software that actually does execute directly upon computers without the need of a Virtual Machine, but what could it be? If you are lucky, perhaps there are some computer science books in your high school library, and with a little careful detective work on your part you discover a book on the C++ language, which looks a lot like Java, but with many bug-inducing complications, like the overloading of operators, multiple inheritance, and pointers that were later discarded by the Java programming language as a simplifying measure to improve reliability. Similarly, you might also discover in a textbook that C++ came from the purely procedural C language, which also looks a lot like C++ and Java, but which is 100% procedural and has no object-oriented classes at all. But you would find that C does have some object-like precursors in the form of unions and functions, which when combined with pointers, can be used to simulate objects to some extent. So with some investigation you would find an evolutionary history for the Java language if you had access to a library of computer science books, but what would you do if all the computer science books had been destroyed, leaving not a trace, and your PC did not have a C or C++ compiler either? Would you vainly search for simpler and simpler versions of Java on your PC, with the hope of ultimately finding one that could run directly on your computer without the need of a Java Virtual Machine?

Similarly, for the hardware that your newly coded Java programs run on, the problem would be even worse, as you quickly figure out that you would need a computer in order to design a computer! There is no way you could possibly design the silicon chips used for CPUs, RAM, and flash memory without the aid of a computer, and you would also need sophisticated process control computers to run the high-tech equipment that make the chips. Yes, there are plenty of available silicon atoms to go around, since 27.7% of the Earth’s crust is composed of silicon, but how would you go about taking sand, also known as silicon dioxide, and turn it into computer chips without the aid of computers? Following my lead in SoftwareBiology, you might head out to your local city landfill and begin excavating. As you dig down through the rubble, you find older and older PCs, which, surprisingly, you find can still be made operational with some work. As you dig down through the deposited layers of garbage, the PCs you come across are found to contain simpler silicon chips, containing fewer and fewer transistors, until finally in the early 1980s, the trail of PCs grows cold, and no more are to be found at lower depths. However, you do continue to find the huge refrigerator-like boxes of discarded mainframes at lower depths that were deposited in the 1970s and they contain even simpler silicon chips. As you dig deeper still, these refrigerator-like boxes are found to stop using silicon chips altogether, and instead, are found to be stuffed with discrete silicon transistors on circuit boards. Finally, in garbage layers from the 1950s, you find discarded mainframes stuffed with row upon row of vacuum tubes – things you have never even seen before, but which look a lot like the archaic incandescent light bulbs that your parents grew up with, and which are rapidly being replaced by CFL and LED light bulbs. The deeper you dig the fewer mainframes you run across until, by the late 1940s, none are found at all in your city landfill, and I am quite confident that you would never run across an old Z3 computer stuffed with electromechanical relays!

So for both software and hardware, simply taking today’s exceedingly complex high-tech architecture and following it backwards leads you to a series of dead-ends because software did not begin as a simplified version of Java and hardware did not begin running on very simple silicon chips. Both software and hardware began by using fundamentally different technologies than today’s and underwent several transitions to get us to where we are today.

There seems to be a similar “chicken or the egg” problem for the researchers currently working on the origin of another form of self-replicating information – the genes. The current high-tech biochemistry used today by the biosphere requires enzymes to replicate DNA and to copy mRNA from DNA in order to make enzymes. So currently, living things need DNA to make enzymes and they need enzymes to make DNA, so which came first, and how could one have come first if both are needed to make the other? This point is key to unraveling the secret to the origin of life. As discussed in Self-Replicating Information, currently there are several competing lines of thought that are all vying to become the accepted theory for the origin of life on Earth. In that posting I discussed the three major theoretical efforts highlighted by Freeman Dyson in the Origins of Life (1999):

1. Metabolism came first - the theory first proposed by Alexander Oparin in The Origin of Life (1924).

2. RNA came first - the “RNA world” theory proposed by Manfred Eigen in 1981.

3. Something else came first - such as Alexander Graham Cairns-Smith’s theory, first proposed in 1966, that there was a clay microcrystal precursor to both RNA and metabolism.

Freeman Dyson liked Cairns-Smith’s idea of a two-stage theory for the origin of life because it eliminated many of the deficiencies found in the “RNA world” theory, such as the “error catastrophe” problem – the fact that the self-replicating processes of the “RNA world” would need to be both very accurate and very simple at the same time. But Freeman Dyson went on to develop his own two-stage theory for the origin of life using Oparin’s purely metabolic form of life as the initial stage, followed by the parasitic/symbiotic appearance of RNA, which first appears as a disease preying upon the initial metabolic pathways, and later forms a symbiotic relationship with them in the tradition of Lynn Margulis.

I just finished reading Cairns-Smith’s Seven Clues to the Origin of Life: A Scientific Detective Story (1985), and I think his idea that Gene 1.0 ran on clay microcrystals instead of nucleic acids needs to be revisited. There is also an excellent website by Tim Tyler on this subject that I would highly recommend at:

The Origin of Life
http://originoflife.net/

One reason that I find Cairns-Smith’s idea that Gene 1.0 ran on clay microcrystals appealing is that, as we have learned from the way that software bootstrapped itself into existence, self-replicating information is notoriously opportunistic and will use just about any technology that is available to self-replicate, and also that self-replicating information really does not care about the underlying technology upon which it runs at any given time. Stephen Jay Gould coined the term “exaptation” for this tendency of living things to opportunistically take advantage of pre-existing structures and processes for other purposes. Darwin called such things a preadaptation, but Gould did not like this terminology because it had a teleological sense to it, as if a species could consciously make preparations in advance for a future need. The term exaptation avoids such confusion. All forms of self-replicating information take advantage of pre-existing technologies, through this process of exaptation, that evolved for one purpose but are later put to work to solve a completely different problem. As I described in Self-Replicating Information, what happens is that organisms develop a primitive function for one purpose, through small incremental changes, and then discover, through serendipity, that this new function can also be used for something completely different. This new use will then further evolve via innovation and natural selection. For example, we have all upon occasion used a screwdriver as a wood chisel in a pinch. Sure the screwdriver was meant to turn screws, but it does a much better job at chipping out wood than your fingernails, so in a pinch, it will do quite nicely. Now just imagine the Darwinian processes of inheritance, innovation and natural selection at work selecting for screwdrivers with broader and sharper blades and a butt more suitable for the blows from a hammer, and soon you will find yourself with a good wood chisel. At some distant point in the future, screwdrivers might even disappear for the want of screws, leaving all to wonder how the superbly adapted wood chisels came to be.

As an IT professional, you probably do this all the time. How often do you write code from scratch? I know that I never do. I simply find the closest piece of existing code that I have on hand and then turn the screwdriver into a wood chisel through small incremental changes to the code, by testing each small change to see how closely my screwdriver has evolved towards becoming a wood chisel. And I think that most of us also code using this Darwinian process of innovation and natural selection too. I am a rather lazy programmer, so many times rather than thinking through a new chunk of code during the iterative process of coding and testing, I will simply make an “educated guess” at the new code to be introduced. After 40 years of coding, you begin to code by “ear”. Many times, I can fall upon the correct code after a few shots of directed random change, and that sure beats racking your brain over new code. Surprisingly, sometimes I even come up with “better” code through this Darwinian process than if I sat down and carefully thought it all through. So the basic idea of grabbing some old code or architectural design elements from a couple of older Applications and slowly modifying them through an iterative process of innovation and natural selection into a new Application is no stranger to IT. As Simon Conway Morris commented in Life’s Solution (2003)

"How much of a complex organism, say a humanoid, has evolved at a much earlier stage, especially in terms of molecular architecture? In other words, how much of us is inherent in a single-celled eukaryote, or even a bacterium? Conversely, we are patently more than microbes, so how many genuinely evolutionary novelties can we identify that make us what we are? It has long been recognized that evolution is a past master at co-option and jury-rigging: redeploying existing structures and cobbling them together in sometimes quite surprising ways. Indeed, in many ways that is evolution”. When I first read those words, I accidentally misread the quote as "Indeed, in many ways that is IT”.

Similarly, on the hardware side, in May of 1941 Konrad Zuse exapted 2400 electromechanical telephone relays into creating his Z3 computer. The telephone relays were not originally designed for this purpose. Instead, they were designed to be reliable electrical switches that could be used to make or break circuit connections so that people could speak with each other over the telephone. But Zuse did not use these relay connections for communications. Instead, he used the fact that a relay could be either in an open or closed state to store a binary digit of “1” or “0”. You can read about his adventures in computing in his own words at:

Konrad Zuse
http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/Zuse.html

Konrad Zuse did not use vacuum tubes as switches to store “1s” and “0s” for the Z3 because he thought that it would be impossible to keep thousands of vacuum tubes up and running long enough to complete computations, but in the 1940s and 1950s vacuum tubes were indeed used by all the computers of the age. However, vacuum tubes were not invented to run computers either. Vacuum tubes were originally invented to amplify analog radio signals and were exapted by the nascent computing industry into service. Vacuum tubes have a grid between a hot negative cathode filament and a cold positive anode plate. By varying the voltage on the grid you can control the amount of current between the cathode and the anode. So a vacuum tube acts very much like a faucet, in fact, the English call them “valves”. By rotating the faucet handle back and forth a little, like a weak input voltage to the grid, you can make the faucet flow vary by large amounts, from a bare trickle to full blast, and thereby amplify the input signal. That is how a weak analog radio signal can be amplified by a number of vacuum tube stages into a current large enough to drive a speaker. Just as you can turn a faucet on full blast or completely off, you can do the same thing with vacuum tubes, so that they behave like telephone relays, and can be in a conducting or nonconducting state to store a binary “1” or “0”. Similarly, when computer hardware migrated to discrete transistors and finally to integrated circuit chips, they once again exapted these devices from the consumer electronics industry. Like a vacuum tube, a transistor has a gate, source, and a drain, and a varying voltage at the gate can control the current between the source and drain. Discrete transistors and integrated circuits were not primarily designed for computers, but for other electronic devices, like transistor radios and stereo systems that had a much larger market. So the computing industry has opportunistically taken advantage of the available information storage and processing hardware ever since its inception.

Thus it is quite possible that an early form of metabolic self-replicating information, similar to Oparin’s proto-cell, could have opportunistically exapted clay microcrystals to run Gene 1.0 on. Or perhaps Cairns-Smith is right and clay microcrystals running Gene 1.0 in a free state exapted organic molecules to enhance their ability to self-replicate. When contemporaneous forms of self-replicating information form parasitic/symbiotic relationships with each other it is hard to say. For example, software first bootstrapped itself into existence as a form of self-replicating information parasitizing the need for humans to do mathematical operations in an automated manner and quickly went on to form very strong parasitic/symbiotic relationships with nearly every meme-complex on the planet, and in doing so, has domesticated our minds into churning out ever more software of ever more complexity. Just as genes are in a constant battle with other genes for survival, and memes battle other memes for space in human minds, software is also in a constant battle with other forms of software for disk space and memory addresses. Natural selection favors complex software with increased functionality, throughput, and reliability, so software naturally has progressed to greater levels of complexity over time. As IT professionals, writing and supporting software, and as end-users, installing and using software, we are all essentially temporary software enzymes caught up in a frantic interplay of self-replicating information, until the day comes when software can finally self-replicate on its own. Cairns-Smith calls the later rise of parasitic/symbiotic RNA the “Genetic Takeover” in Genetic Takeover: And the Mineral Origins of Life (1982), which describes the rise of Gene 2.0 running on RNA and DNA.

Crystals are natural products of the second law of thermodynamics. When individual atoms in a melt come together into a crystalline lattice the entropy of the atoms decreases because they are in a more ordered microstate. However, the free-wheeling atoms jiggling about in the melt also release a “heat of fusion” into the remaining melt as some of their free energy is given up as they click into place into the lattice, so the entropy of the entire universe still increases. Similar thermodynamic processes that preserve the second law of thermodynamics also occur when crystals form out of saturated water solutions. Thanks to the second law of thermodynamics, natural crystals also come with defects caused by atoms in the lattice that are slightly misaligned or by atomic intruders that should not even be in the crystal lattice in the first place. Thus crystals combine the periodic regularity of self-assembled atoms, modulated by crystal defects, that is perfect for the storage of information. For me, crystals just seem to be too good of an information storage technology for a metabolic proto-cell to pass by and too easy to exapt into use, but that just might be a symptom of my anthropocentric inclinations as a carbon-based life form. Perhaps clay microcrystals had the same opinion of organic molecules!

In fact, there is some evidence that points to simple life forms exapting crystals into use. In 1975 Richard Blakemore discovered magnetotactic bacteria that could sense the Earth’s magnetic field and swim along its field lines. Magnetotactic bacteria have organelles called magnetosomes that contain magnetic crystals of magnetite (Fe₃O₄) or greigite (Fe₃S₄). The magnetotactic bacteria grow chains of these magnetic particles under the chemical control of the magnetosomes. These magnetic crystals are between 35 and 120 nm in size, which is just large enough to have a magnetic field, but small enough so that the crystals have a single magnetic dipole domain, like a very small compass needle. These magnetic crystals allow the bacteria to sense the Earth’s magnetic field and use it to navigate. It is thought that magnetotactic bacteria first evolved in the early Proterozoic, perhaps 2.5 billion years ago. I once saw these magnetotactic bacteria in action at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. The exhibit lets you turn an external magnet, and as you do so, the bacteria swim in a new direction. Similarly, higher forms of life use biomineralization to grow shells and bones from crystals of calcium carbonate, silica, or phosphate carbonate. So there has been a long history of association between mineral crystals and living things.

Personally, my hunch is that life first originated several thousand feet below the Earth’s surface in porous reservoirs near hydrothermal vents. The pore spaces in the heavily fractured rock near a hydrothermal vent would provide the ideal habitat, with an abundant supply of hot, energy-rich, organic molecules and crystal precipitating ions in the pore fluids circulating through the rock. This environment would also be isolated from the planet-wide sterilizing impacts from the late heavy bombardment that peppered the Earth and Moon 4.1 – 3.8 billion years ago with countless impacts from comets careening in from the outer Solar System. It is thought that at the time of the late heavy bombardment, that Jupiter and Saturn had entered into a 2:1 orbital resonance, with Saturn making one orbit for every two orbits of Jupiter, and that the two planets had flung a nearby Neptune out to its current orbital position as the most distant planet from the Sun. Neptune then dislodged many of the surrounding comets from its new-found neighborhood, causing them to plunge in towards the inner planets like the Earth, producing many deadly collisions that boiled away the Earth’s oceans time and time again. Seeking refuge several thousand feet below the mayhem of the Earth’s surface would allow life to safely originate 4.0 – 4.2 billion years ago during the late heavy bombardment and persist in an undisturbed manner to this very day. In fact, there are still plenty of microbes down there. You can actually hire firms to analyze the bacteria in your oil field reservoirs to help prevent them from becoming soured by bacteria that produce hydrogen sulfide gas.

So will we ever really figure out the exact sequence of events leading up to the origin of life? As I pointed out in A Proposal For All Practicing Paleontologists my suspicion is that there would be a great deal of controversy in simply putting together a non-contentious history for the evolution of software too, with much debate regarding the importance and priority of many of the events in the evolution of software architecture, even with all of the data freely at hand and with most of the events having occurred within living memory, so no wonder biologists working on the origin of life have such a hard go of it! Similarly, many attempts have been made to produce a timeline for the development of computing hardware. One of my favorites is:

An Illustrated History of Computers
http://www.computersciencelab.com/ComputerHistory/History.htm

When you look at all of this hardware, it is very difficult to put your finger on a particular device and emphatically claim it to be the very first computer. For example, was Konrad Zuse’s purely mechanical Z1, completed in 1938 in his parents’ living room, a real computer? It had a control unit, memory, an arithmetic unit with four basic operations for floating point numbers, input and output devices and it could read programs from a punched tape, but it did not store programs in memory and it did not have a logic unit that could compare bits. Similarly, I think that it would be very difficult to put your finger on the very first form of life on Earth too.

Unfortunately, figuring out the exact mechanisms that were involved in the origin of life on Earth will probably never be fully completed. Like the origin of software and computing hardware, it probably was such a hodge-podge of precursors, false starts, and failed attempts that nobody will ever be able to fully unravel it all. After all, if we had been there to see it all unfold, we would probably still be debating today what exactly had happened! But the very muddled origin of software and computing hardware seem to provide a very good model for the origin of all forms of self-replicating information. The important thing to keep in mind is that self-replicating information is very opportunistic and will exapt whatever information storage technology happens to be handy at the time. Also, as we have seen from the evolutionary history of software, self-replicating information does not really care about what particular medium or information storage technology it uses at any given moment since it has a propensity to jump from one technology to another. For example, software has jumped from purely mechanical information storage devices to electromechanical relays, vacuum tubes, discrete transistors, integrated circuits and may soon be running on optical chips using quantum mechanical effects to store information. This would indicate that researchers working on the origin of life should perhaps broaden their horizons and not focus exclusively upon organic molecules as the sole precursors to the origin of life on Earth, and should try giving clay a chance.

Comments are welcome at scj333@sbcglobal.net

To see all posts on softwarephysics in reverse order go to:
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/

Regards,
Steve Johnston

Is the Universe Fine-Tuned for Self-Replicating Information?

This posting will focus on the three forms of self-replicating information on this planet – genes, memes, and software – and the apparent fine-tuning of the Universe to make all three possible. As we saw in Self-Replicating Information all forms of self-replicating information have a commonality of shared properties, resulting from their common struggle with the second law of thermodynamics in a nonlinear Universe, that allow us to learn about one, by examining the others. As I pointed out in The Origin of Software the Origin of Life, success for our current SETS program - the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Software – seems to have a precondition for the emergence of intelligent beings in the Universe to appear first, and to form a scaffolding upon which software can later arise and ultimately begin its exploration of our galaxy. Since the emergence of intelligent beings is apparently so important for the subsequent emergence of software, let us start there.

For the current stellar-dominant phase in the evolution of our Universe, this seems to be contingent upon the emergence of intelligent carbon-based life forms, and as many physicists and cosmologists have pointed out, our Universe seems to be indeed strangely fine-tuned for the emergence of carbon-based life forms. If you change any of the 20+ constants of the Standard Model of particle physics by just a few percent or less, you end up with a universe incapable of sustaining intelligent carbon-based beings. Similarly, in 1969 Robert Dicke noted that the amount of matter and energy in the Universe was very close to the amount required for a flat spacetime to a remarkable degree. If you run today’s near flatness of spacetime back to the time of the Big Bang, spacetime would have had to have been flat to within one part in 10⁶⁰! This is known as the “flatness problem” in cosmology. If spacetime had just a very slight positive curvature at the time of the Big Bang, then our Universe would have quickly expanded and recollapsed back into a singularity in a very brief period of time and there would not have been enough time to form stars or living things. Similarly, if spacetime had a very slight initial negative curvature, it would have rapidly expanded – our Universe would have essentially blown itself to bits, forming a very thinly populated vacuum which could not have formed stars or living things.

The apparent fine-tuning of our Universe for intelligent carbon-based life forms is troubling for most theorists because it is difficult to explain. For the religious at heart, the explanation is quite simple – there must be a deity who created the Universe deliberately fine-tuned for intelligent carbon-based life. But that explanation just pushes the problem back one level because then you have to explain where the deity came from and why a hypothetical super-Universe, beyond our own Universe, was fined-tuned to bring forth such a deity in the first place. This all goes against the pantheistic grain of many scientists, who have a bit of a spiritualistic bent at heart, and who share the philosophical inclinations of both Spinoza and Einstein. An alternative explanation that the scientific community seems to be slowly embracing is Brandon Carter’s Anthropic Principle (1973), which comes in several flavors, the least contentious being the weak version of the Anthropic Principle:

The Weak Anthropic Principle - Intelligent beings will only find themselves existing in universes capable of sustaining intelligent beings.

At first glance, this proposition seems to just state the obvious, but it does have implications. If we are indeed intelligent beings then our Universe must be fine-tuned to sustain intelligent beings, and that fine-tuning must extend throughout the entire Universe as well, allowing for the emergence of other intelligent beings elsewhere, but why? The two most common explanations offered for the Weak Anthropic Principle are that either our Universe was intentionally designed with such fine-tuning in mind, or our Universe is just one of many possible universes in a multiverse. Proponents of the multiverse explanation go on to explain that most universes in the multiverse do not have the necessary physics to sustain intelligent beings and are quite sterile, but like all lottery losers, nobody is in those universes wondering why there is no intelligent life, only the exceedingly rare lottery winners sit in stunned amazement, holding winning tickets to a fine-tuned universe.

But is it proper to infer an infinite multiverse of universes from the mere fact that we exist? Fortunately, we have an historical analogy that can shed some light on the subject. Towards the end of the 16th century, Giordano Bruno took Copernicus’s heliocentric model of the Solar System (1543) one step further. Giordano Bruno was an early pantheist who conceived of a deity that was one with the Universe, rather than being a deity existing in a remote heaven-based-universe beyond our own physical Universe. Giordano Bruno thought that such an infinite pantheistic deity must necessarily exist in an infinite Universe, with no beginning and no end, and infinite in both space and time. Like Copernicus, Bruno believed that the planets orbited the Sun, but additionally, Bruno figured that the stars must simply be distant suns with their own sets of planets and that these distant planets could also harbor alien life forms and intelligent beings as well. Clearly, Giordano Bruno was about 400 years ahead of his times, which put him in conflict with many of the prevailing meme-complexes of the day, and sadly, he was burned at the stake by the Roman Inquisition on February 17, 1600. But the implications of his cosmology are remarkably similar to those of the Weak Anthropic Principle. Once you posit a Universe containing a near-infinite number of planets, chances are that some of those planets would necessarily be capable of sustaining intelligent carbon-based life forms by sheer luck, and intelligent carbon-based life forms would only find themselves existing on such planets. This seems to be our current situation here on Earth – we exist on one of the very rare lucky planets in our Universe. So without even the benefit of the crude telescope that Galileo was about to turn upon the night sky in 1610, Giordano Bruno was able to infer that there must be a large, or near-infinite, number of planets with intelligent beings in our Universe that we cannot see, but must exist, nonetheless, because we exist.

Another appealing feature of a multiverse, in addition to eliminating the need for our apparently fine-tuned Universe to be intentionally designed, is that it addresses a problem in string theory. The Standard Model of particle physics was a big improvement over the 400+ unrelated “fundamental” particles discovered in the 1960s, but when you add up all of the various colored particles and their antimatter twins, you end up with about 63 particles (see The Foundations of Quantum Computing for details). Many physicists think that our Universe simply cannot be so complicated and that there has to be a simpler model. One promising model is called supersymmetric string theory, or string theory for short. String theory contends that all of the particles of the Standard Model are actually strings or membranes vibrating in an 11-dimensional Universe. The strings or membranes are made of pure energy, or perhaps, pure mathematics and vibrate with different frequencies. The different vibrational frequencies account for the differing physical properties of the particles, like the different frequencies of a vibrating guitar string account for the differing notes emanating from a guitar. According to string theory, at the time of the Big Bang, three of the 11 spatial dimensions suddenly began to expand and so did the 4th dimension of time. The remaining 7 dimensions remained microscopically small beyond our ability to observe them. String theory research has dominated physics for the past 20 years but unfortunately string theory is now running on pure mathematics, without the benefit of the third step in the Scientific Method - experimental verification of the theory using inductive empiricism. Unfortunately, the predicted vibrating strings and membranes are so small that they are far beyond the reach of our current accelerators by many orders of magnitude. Now the initial hope for string theory was that there would be one, and only one, self-consistent formulation of the theory and that the Standard Model and its 20+ constants would naturally fall out from it. But that is not what has happened. Over the years, it has become evident that one can form a nearly infinite number of universes with string theory by slightly changing the geometry of the dimensions in which the strings and membranes vibrate. Leonard Susskind calls this The Cosmic Landscape (2006) in his book by the same title. As do many cosmologists, Susskind proposes that there are an infinite number of other universes forming a multiverse, with each universe having its own physics determined by the number and geometry of its dimensions.

So nowadays in both physics and cosmology, it seems as though there is a lot riding on the Weak Anthropic Principle and its implication that there is a near-infinite multiverse of universes out there, with possibly a near-infinite number of ways of doing physics. But the Weak Anthropic Principle makes this inference on the basis that the apparent fine-tuning of our Universe for the existence of intelligent beings is exceptional. But what if that were not the case? What if the existence of intelligent beings in a Universe, just about any kind of Universe at all, was the rule and not the exception and a relatively easy accomplishment to achieve? In this posting, I would like to make that very proposition, by introducing the Very Weak Anthropic Principle:

The Very Weak Anthropic Principle - Intelligent beings will only find themselves existing in a universe capable of sustaining self-replicating information, and self-replicating information will only be found in a universe that begins in a low-entropy initial state.

To understand the implications of the Very Weak Anthropic Principle, it would be a good time to review the concepts of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics found in Entropy - the Bane of Programmers and The Demon of Software, and also the role that both played in the evolution of living things and software found in SoftwareBiology and Self-Replicating Information. Additional insights can also be found in From Eternity to Here (2010) by Sean Carroll, which has the subtitle of The Quest For the Ultimate Theory of Time, but for our purposes serves as a spectacular study of the second law of thermodynamics and entropy and their far-reaching roles in the evolution of our Universe. The central aim of this book is to focus attention on why our Universe started out with such a very low entropy at the time of the Big Bang, and that is fundamental to understanding the Very Weak Anthropic Principle, so I will be making quite a few references to it.

In Entropy - the Bane of Programmers we saw that thermodynamics was an outgrowth of the desire by physicists and engineers in the 19th century to better understand and improve upon steam engines. Thermodynamics describes the behaviors of macroscopic systems, like steam engines, in terms of changes in their macroscopic properties, like changes in their pressures, temperatures, and volumes, as these macroscopic systems operate. We also explored the second law of thermodynamics, as it was first proposed by Rudolph Clausius in 1850, in terms of objects cooling off and the smoothing out of differences in bulk matter, like the mixing of gasses. Clausius defined this general running down of systems in terms of a quantity he called entropy, which he defined in terms of the flow of heat from one object to another. The second law of thermodynamics stated that heat could flow from a hot object to a cooler object, but not the other way around. In the 19th century, thermodynamics and Newtonian mechanics were considered to be two entirely different domains within physics and unrelated in any way. Thermodynamics was applicable to the vagaries of steam engines and boilers, while Newtonian mechanics made sense of the planetary motions about the Sun and the flight of cannon balls in time of war. Furthermore, the second law of thermodynamics was also considered to be a “real” law of the Universe and just as sacrosanct as Newton’s three laws of motion. However, in The Demon of Software, we saw how later in the 19th century Ludwig Boltzmann tried to unify thermodynamics with Newtonian mechanics by creating a new branch of physics known as statistical mechanics. With statistical mechanics, Boltzmann tried to demonstrate that all of thermodynamics could be derived from Newtonian mechanics by simply considering bulk matter to be composed of a large collection of molecules constantly bouncing around and following Newton’s three laws of motion in collisions at the microscopic level. One of the difficulties that Boltzmann faced with this new approach to thermodynamics was that now the second law of thermodynamics took on a statistical nature. The second law was no longer a sacred law of physics, but simply a very good bet. This bothered many 19th-century physicists, who considered the second law of thermodynamics to be just as sacred as Newton’s three laws of motion.

To highlight Boltzmann’s probabilistic approach to statistical mechanics we explored the concepts of the second law of thermodynamics and entropy in terms of poker. We equated the different kinds of poker hands with the concept of a macrostate. For example, a K-K-K-4-4 would constitute the macrostate of a full house. For any given poker hand, or macrostate, like a full house, there are a number of microstates that yield the macrostate. So for the macrostate of a full house a K-K-K-4-4, J-J-J-9-9, and a 7-7-7-2-2 would all be microstates of the full house macrostate. Following the work of Ludwig Boltzmann (1872), we found that for any given poker hand that we could calculate the entropy of the hand, or macrostate, by applying Boltzmann’s famous equation:

S = k ln(N)

S = entropy
N = number of microstates
k = Boltzmann’s constant

For our poker analogy, we set Boltzmann’s constant to k = 1, since k is just a “fudge factor” used to get the units of entropy using Boltzmann’s equation to match those used by the thermodynamic formulas for entropy.

We also used Leon Brillouin’s concept of information to calculate the amount of information in a particular poker hand, or macrostate, as the difference between its entropy and the maximum possible entropy of all poker hands:

Information = S_i - S_f
S_i = initial entropy
S_f = final entropy

The entropy of a macrostate defines its degree of disorder and its probability of happening. Macrostates with little entropy, like a straight flush, have a great deal of order but are very unlikely because they have so few microstates. Similarly, macrostates with lots of entropy, like a pair, have little order but are much more likely to occur because they have a huge number of possible microstates. At any given time a system, like the cards you are currently holding in a poker game, will be in some macrostate defined by a particular microstate. So let’s say that you are holding the macrostate of a full house defined by a microstate of Q-Q-Q-7-7. From the table in The Demon of Software, we see that a full house has an entropy of 8.2279098 and a probability of occurring of 0.00144. Now I am going to change the rules of poker again. When it comes time to draw cards, you can draw one, two, or three cards, but not only does the dealer deal you the new cards, he also chooses the cards that you discard! So you put all five cards face down on the table, tell the dealer how many cards you wish to draw, and then the dealer deals out your draw cards and discards an equal number of cards from your hand at random. So what do you do? From the table in The Demon of Software, we see that your full house macrostate with a microstate of Q-Q-Q-7-7 already has a relatively low entropy and a low probability of occurring. The odds are that if you draw even a single card that the entropy of your hand will increase, and you will end up with a lower ranked hand, like two pair or three of a kind. Of course, you could get really lucky and draw another Q, while the dealer discards one of your 7s, but that would be a real long shot. This, then, is the essence of the second law of thermodynamics in Boltzmann’s statistical mechanics. Systems tend to increase in entropy, not because of some fundamental law of the Universe, but simply because high-entropy macrostates (low-ranked poker hands) with lots of microstates are much more likely to occur than low-entropy macrostates (high-ranked poker hands) with few microstates. In simple terms, you are more likely to be dealt a pair than a straight flush simply because there are more ways to be dealt a pair than to be dealt a straight flush. Thus in Boltzmann’s view, the second law of thermodynamics reduces to just being a really safe bet that entropy will increase and not a fundamental law that it always must. So in Boltzmann’s view, in very rare cases, the entropy of an isolated system can spontaneously decrease all on its own, in apparent violation of the second law of thermodynamics.

The beauty of Boltzmann’s statistical approach to the second law of thermodynamics is that it is the only “law” in physics that we really understand at a fundamental level because it really is not a “law” at all in the same sense as the other “laws” of classical 19th century physics, which by definition could not be violated. Recall that in the 20th century we learned that all of the other “laws” of the Universe are really just effective theories in physics that are approximations of reality. An effective theory is an approximation of reality that only holds true over a certain restricted range of conditions and only provides for a certain depth of understanding of the problem at hand. For example, Newtonian mechanics works very well for objects moving in weak gravitational fields at less than 10% of the speed of light and which are larger than a very small mote of dust. For things moving at high velocities, or in strong gravitational fields, we must use relativity theory, and for very small things like atoms, we must use quantum mechanics. All of the current theories of physics, such as Newtonian mechanics, classical electrodynamics, thermodynamics, the special and general theories of relativity, quantum mechanics, and quantum field theories like QED and QCD are just effective theories that are based upon models of reality, and all of these models are approximations – all of these models are fundamentally "wrong", but at the same time, these effective theories make exceedingly good predictions of the behavior of physical systems over the limited ranges in which they apply (see Model-Dependent Realism - A Positivistic Approach to Realism for more details).

Boltzmann’s new statistical concept of the second law of thermodynamics also addressed a bothersome problem for 19th-century astronomy. At the time, physicists and astronomers thought that the Universe was infinitely old. In those early days, nobody really knew what was powering the Universe, but they did realize that the Universe was a dynamical system degrading some kind of low-entropy potential energy into the high-entropy energy of heat that was constantly moving to lower temperatures because of the second law of thermodynamics. For example, nobody knew what was powering the Sun, but they did know that the Sun was giving off huge amounts of electromagnetic energy in the form of sunlight. When the sunlight reached the Earth and was absorbed, it heated up both the land and sea, which then radiated infrared electromagnetic energy back into space with a longer wavelength and a greater entropy. At each step in the process, the first law of thermodynamics guaranteed that all of the energy was conserved, none of it was lost and no additional energy spontaneously appeared on its own. But at the same time, the second law of thermodynamics demanded that the entropy of the energy had to increase at each step, and when 19th century physicists performed experiments that simulated these processes in the lab that is indeed what they found. So if the Universe were infinitely old, then according to the second law of thermodynamics, all of the energy in the Universe should have already been converted into heat energy at a very low constant temperature, and the Universe should be in a state of an unchanging equilibrium, with a maximum of entropy. In classical 19th century thermodynamics, once an isolated system has attained a state of maximum entropy, it can no longer change and is essentially dead, and in the 19th century, this was known as the “Heat Death” of the Universe. To address this issue Boltzmann came up with his own version of the Weak Anthropic Principle. Since intelligent beings could not possibly exist in an unchanging Universe at equilibrium and in a state of maximum entropy, we must obviously be living in a very strange and fluky tiny portion of a much larger Universe. Most of the Universe would indeed be in equilibrium, at a maximum entropy, and in a “Heat Death” condition, but our little portion of the Universe must be a statistical fluke, at a much lower entropy, that spontaneously came to be out of the random motions of molecules in our patch of the Universe. It would be like the spontaneous unmixing of two gasses that the second law of thermodynamics forbids but on a much grander scale.

Figure 1 – The second law of thermodynamics predicts that two unmixed gases will mix into an unchanging homogeneous mixture at equilibrium with a maximum of entropy (click to enlarge)

Figure 2 – Once a state of maximum entropy has been attained the mixture will no longer change as it enters a “Heat Death” macroscopic condition (click to enlarge)

Figure 3 – But Boltzmann’s new statistical view of the second law of thermodynamics does allow a mixed gas to spontaneously unmix on very rare occasions (click to enlarge)

Although the classical second law of thermodynamics forbids such processes, in Boltzmann’s new statistical view of the second law of thermodynamics, it is very unlikely, but still possible, for a tiny patch of an infinitely large and infinitely old Universe to spontaneously evolve into a low-entropy state such as ours. It would be like starting off with a poker hand of “nothing” with an entropy of 14.7706235 and after drawing three cards ending up with a royal flush with an entropy of 1.3862944. It would take a very long time to be so fortunate, but if the Universe were infinitely old, there would be plenty of time for it to have happened, and for it to have happened an infinite number of times in the past.

Now with all that background material behind us, what does it take for self-replicating information to arise? I would like to argue that it does not take that much at all. All it requires is the existence of a second law of thermodynamics and a low-entropy initial state for a universe to bring forth self-replicating information in some fashion. A second law of thermodynamics is necessary for the emergence of self-replicating information because the second law is the driving force behind the Darwinian mechanisms of innovation and natural selection that select for self-replicating information from information that does not self-replicate and allow it to emerge and evolve. The second law guarantees that some level of copying errors will occur whenever self-replicating information replicates, resulting in mutations that, on rare occasions, provide for beneficial innovations. The second law also guarantees that the low-entropy materials used to encode self-replicating information and the free energy necessary to replicate it will be in short supply, since the necessary building materials will have a tendency to degrade into high-entropy waste materials, and the free energy will tend to degrade into useless heat energy. The scarcity of these items creates a struggle for existence amongst the competing forms of self-replicating information, leading to the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection. After all, if it had not been for the second law of thermodynamics, and food and shelter spontaneously emerged out of nothing, we would all be fat and happy bacteria today! Finally, because there will always be more microstates for a disordered high-entropy macrostate, than there are microstates for an ordered low-entropy macrostate, in all possible universes, all universes must necessarily have a second law of thermodynamics, no matter what physics they might be running on at the moment. It’s just in the cards that all possible universes must have a second law of thermodynamics. Consequently, all that is really needed for the existence of intelligent beings is for a universe to begin in an initial state of low entropy.

Now it looks like we have nearly finished our derivation of the Very Weak Anthropic Principle. Since all possible universes must contain a second law of thermodynamics, all we have to do is explain why our Universe began in a low-entropy state. Frequently in textbooks on thermodynamics, it is inferred that since our Universe is currently not in a state of maximum entropy, it must have been in a state of much lower entropy in the distant past because entropy always has to increase with time. In From Eternity to Here Sean Carroll points out that this is not necessarily true. It all has to do with the conservation of information and reversible processes. This time I am not talking about Leon Brillouin’s concept of information as a difference in entropies, but rather the “other” concept of information that I mentioned in The Demon of Software in regards to black holes conserving information. A reversible process is a process that can be run backwards in time to return the Universe back to the state that it had before the process even began as if the process had never even happened in the first place. For example, the collision between two molecules at low energy is a reversible process that can be run backwards in time to return the Universe to its original state because Newton’s laws of motion are reversible. Knowing the position of each molecule at any given time and also its momentum, a combination of its speed, direction, and mass, we can predict where each molecule will go after a collision between the two, and also where each molecule came from before the collision using Newton’s laws of motion. For a reversible process such as this, the information required to return a system back to its initial state cannot be destroyed, no matter how many collisions might occur, in order to be classified as a reversible process that is operating under reversible physical laws.

Figure 4 – The collision between two molecules at low energy is a reversible process because Newton’s laws of motion are reversible (click to enlarge)

Currently, all of the effective theories of physics, what many people call the “laws” of the Universe, are indeed reversible, except for the second law of thermodynamics, but that is because, as we saw above, the second law is really not a fundamental “law” of the Universe at all. In order for a law of the Universe to be reversible, it must conserve information. That means that two different initial microstates cannot evolve into the same microstate at a later time. For example, in the collision between the blue and pink molecules in Figure 4, the blue and pink molecules both begin with some particular position and momentum one second before the collision and end up with different positions and momenta at one second after the collision. In order for the process to be reversible and Newton’s laws of motion to be reversible too, this has to be unique. A different set of identical blue and pink molecules starting out with different positions and momenta one second before the collision could not end up with the same positions and momenta one second after the collision as the first set of blue and pink molecules. If that were to happen, then one second after the collision, we would not be able to tell what the original positions and momenta of the two molecules were one second before the collision since there would now be two possible alternatives, and we would not be able to uniquely reverse the collision. We would not know which set of positions and momenta the blue and pink molecules originally had one second before the collision, and the information required to reverse the collision would be destroyed.

Now suppose you find yourself in a universe that looks like Figure 3 and has a relatively low-entropy microstate relative to the maximum entropy of Figure 2. How did you get that way? At first, you might think that you got that way by evolving from a universe with an even lower entropy, like one that had all of the molecules tightly confined to a corner in each half of the two boxes. But that would not be very likely. The most likely thing to have occurred is that you started out in a universe like Figure 2! To get to a universe like Figure 3, all you have to do is reverse the speed and direction of each molecule in Figure 2, and you end up with a universe like Figure 3, because the universe in Figure 2 evolved from the universe in Figure 1 in the first place. Since there will be a huge number of configurations like Figure 2, relative to the number of configurations with all of the molecules in each box neatly packed into corners, the most likely way of getting to Figure 3 is from a much higher entropy Figure 2. So if you find yourself in a relatively low-entropy universe such as ours, you cannot simply use the second law of thermodynamics to infer that your universe started out as an even lower entropy universe in the distant past. Instead, you have to make what Sean Carroll calls the Past Hypothesis, that for some reason, your universe started out in an initial state with a very low entropy in the first place.

In From Eternity to Here Sean Carroll goes on to offer several explanations for the Past Hypothesis of why our Universe began with a very low initial entropy. The one that he finally homes in on, and which I find quite appealing, is a model composed of a multiverse of self-replicating baby universes. Sean Carroll explains that under the relentless pressures of the second law of thermodynamics to constantly increase the entropy of a universe, a universe in a multiverse ultimately degenerates into a state where everything is confined to a large number of black holes. Such a universe filled with black holes ultimately degenerates, via Hawking radiation, into a nearly empty universe with a small amount of positive vacuum energy and a maximum of entropy. This takes a long time - about 10¹⁰⁰ years. Another good book that also describes this degenerative process is The Five Ages of the Universe (1999) by Fred Adams and Greg Laughlin. Then the universe must wait for a very very long time. After a seeming eternity of time, a quantum fluctuation in the very dilute remaining quantum fields of the universe suddenly creates a tiny pinch of “false vacuum” in the universe (see The Foundations of Quantum Computing for details on quantum field theory). Most times this pinch of “false vacuum” simply collapses back into the dilute fluctuating quantum fields of the universe, but upon exceedingly rare occasions, this region of “false vacuum” pinches off into a new baby universe. The new baby universe then inflates into a full-blown universe, such as ours, that is essentially made out of “nothing”, with no net energy, momentum, or angular momentum, but it does have an initial state with a very low entropy. Energy is conserved because the energy of the radiation and matter that form as the “false vacuum” of the baby universe decays while inflating, is exactly matched by the negative gravitational potential energy that arises due to the presence of the matter and radiation in the baby universe. The initial entropy of the baby universe starts out very low, but this is not a violation of the second law of thermodynamics because the entropy of its maternal universe is still at a maximum, and the entropy of the multiverse as a whole does not decrease with the addition of a new low-entropy baby universe.

Figure 5 – A low-entropy baby universe can emerge from a quantum fluctuation in the residual quantum fields of a relatively dead universe that has reached a state of maximum entropy(click to enlarge)

So in Sean Carroll’s model of the multiverse, we find an infinite number of universes constantly spawning new universes, as each universe relentlessly progresses to a state of maximum entropy under the pressures of the second law of thermodynamics. A baby universe may inherit its physics from its maternal universe, or it might branch out on its own with a new set of physical laws, but thanks to the ubiquitous nature of the second law of thermodynamics, the end result will always be the same, a universe at maximum entropy spawning additional child universes with low entropy.

Figure 6 – The multiverse is composed of an infinite number of universes that are constantly replicating as they reach a state of maximum entropy under the pressures of the second law of thermodynamics (click to enlarge)

For me such a self-replicating multiverse has an almost fractal nature at heart, like the Mandelbrot set that is defined by a simple recursive algorithm in the complex plane:

Z_n+1=Z_n*Z_n + C

Figure 7 – The multiverse can be thought of as a fractal form of self-replicating information, like the Mandelbrot set, with no beginning and no end (click to enlarge)

Now to get back to the original question posed by this posting - is the Universe fine-tuned for self-replicating information? In many ways, the multiverse described by Sean Carroll is indeed fine-tuned for self-replicating information because it essentially is a form of self-replicating information in itself. On the other hand, because his model also explains why all universes begin with a very low level of entropy, it also explains the Very Weak Anthropic Principle, and if the Very Weak Anthropic Principle is true, then the requirements for the fine-tuning of a universe are greatly relaxed, and the presence of intelligent beings in a universe is not such a discriminating factor. What is discriminating is the requirement that there be a fine-tuning selection process that starts universes off with a low initial entropy. This relieves some of the anthropocentric tension found in the other forms of the Anthropic Principle because human beings can no longer be accused of following their natural tendency to gravitate towards the center of the Universe. Just about any universe will do for intelligent beings to arise and ultimately initiate the emergence of software, and provide a scaffolding upon which software can later proliferate until the day comes when software can finally self-replicate on its own.

Comments are welcome at scj333@sbcglobal.net

To see all posts on softwarephysics in reverse order go to:
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/

Regards,
Steve Johnston

Can Your Website Think?

One of the propositions of softwarephysics is that there are currently three forms of self-replicating information on Earth – genes, memes, and software – with software rapidly becoming the dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet. As outlined in Self-Replicating Information, all forms of self-replicating information have a commonality of shared properties that allow us to learn about one by examining the others. Over billions of years, the genes have learned to create conscious beings through the Darwinian mechanisms of innovation and natural selection. The genes certainly did not plan on this happening, since genes are just mindless forms of self-replicating information, but it happened just the same in a purely mechanistic manner as huge neural networks developed in complex multicellular organisms such as ours. So the question becomes did the same thing happen for the memes and might it happen for software as well? Meme-complexes do seem to have a mind of their own as they respond to changes in the Zeitgeist of the times, but since memes are forms of self-replicating information that only exist in the minds of DNA survival machines, to begin with, the analogy does not easily carry forward in an unambiguous manner for software, so let us focus our attention on the consciousness of the DNA survival machines that the genes have brought forth, and to see if it can be extended to software as well.

The problem of what constitutes a conscious sentient being has been troubling philosophers, theologians, and scientists from the very beginning, and has not been satisfactorily explained by any of them. Fortunately, the extreme difficulty of the subject matter seems to stimulate the field in many disciplines. Some philosophers and many researchers working on AI (Artificial Intelligence) adopt a positivistic approach to the subject in that they don’t care what consciousness “really is”; they only care about how conscious beings are observed to behave. For AI an important advance along these lines came about with Alan Turing’s paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950) in which he proposed his famous test. In this paper, Turing proposed having a judge ask questions of a conscious human being and a computer via two terminals. If the judge could not tell the difference between the human being and the computer from her interactions with both, then the computer would pass the Turing test for intelligence. A few months ago we saw IBM’s Watson supercomputer trounce his human opponents on Jeopardy using massively parallel processing software running on a cluster of 90 IBM Power 750 servers with a total of 2880 POWER7 processor cores and 16 Terabytes of memory. It could be argued that Watson failed the Turing test, not because he could not keep pace with his human opponents, but because nobody could possibly be that good at Jeopardy! Or perhaps Watson passed the Turing test, while his human opponents failed it. Anyway, it was quite fascinating to see such impressive levels of AI in action. In a similar manner, GPS units seem to have reached a level of AI far superior to human navigators. My GPS unit speaks to me and tells me exactly what I need to know without me even looking at the device, which is far superior to the directions you would obtain by stopping at a local gas station, even if you could persuade the reluctant attendant to come along for the ride. This AI behavior is especially handy when I decide to wander off the route planned by my GPS unit or I miss a turn. It patiently recomputes the best way to get me back on track to my destination. Once I was driving in downtown Chicago, and because of some local construction, a one-way street had been temporarily turned into a two-way street. As I proceeded to drive the “wrong” way down the one-way street, my GPS unit gently reminded me to please turn around as soon as possible, but when I did not, it finally just told me in disgust to make the proper turn when I reached my final destination. As I was driving the “wrong” way down the one-way street, I just had to wonder what my GPS unit was “thinking”. I was afraid that my GPS unit was thinking that this nut is going to get us both killed if he does not quickly turn around!

In Kinds of Minds (1996) Daniel Dennett extends some of the ideas found in his earlier work Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995) to explain how intelligent consciousness could have evolved from simple neural networks. He explains how sensation, the ability to respond to stimulation in a mindless sort of way, like your home thermostat, could evolve into sentience through the step-by-step Darwinian processes of inheritance, innovation and natural selection. To explain this process, Dennett uses one of his favorite intellectual devices – the Intentional Stance.

Here is how it works: first you decide to treat the object whose behavior is to be predicted as a rational agent; then you figure out what beliefs that agent ought to have, given its place in the world and its purpose. Then you figure out what desires it ought to have, on the same considerations, and finally, you predict that this rational agent will act to further its goals in the light of its beliefs. A little practical reasoning from the chosen set of beliefs and desires will in most instances yield a decision about what the agent ought to do; that is what you predict the agent will do. (Daniel Dennett, The Intentional Stance, p. 17)

At a very early age, we all learned to adopt an Intentional Stance when dealing with our fellow human beings, like our parents and other caregivers. We learned that human beings seemed to operate in a different manner than our blankets and teddy bears. Human beings behaved as if they could “think” and acted as rational agents with their own sets of beliefs and goals. For Dennett, adopting an Intentional Stance towards an external entity is one of the significant landmarks along the road from sensation to sentience. End users of modern-day websites certainly adopt an Intentional Stance towards websites. Not only does the website respond to requests by the end user, it also seems to have its own beliefs, goals, and desires. Many times the website will try to up-sell or cross-sell the end user with products or services, or entice the end user with a special offer to go to paperless billing.

In Kinds of Minds, Dennett also explains that another landmark along the road to consciousness is the ability for an agent to spread its mind out into the world by leaving behind cues and reminders in the environment to help it achieve its goals. This can be found in the lowly ant that leaves behind a pheromone trail on the surface of the soil that can be later followed by the ant or other ants to a source of food, all the way up to human beings who have a multitude of Good Tricks, including language and the written word to leave behind cultural artifacts in the environment that can be later used by our minds or the minds of others. Dennett explains:

We Gregorian creatures are the beneficiaries of literally thousands of ... useful technologies, invented by others in the dim recesses of history or prehistory but transmitted via cultural highways, not via the genetic pathways of inheritance. We learn, thanks to this cultural heritage, how to spread our minds out into the world, where we can put our beautifully designed innate tracking and pattern-recognizing talents to optimal use.

Websites do the same thing with cookies. Cookies come in many flavors and are used to do things such as “maintain state” and “personalize” the website experience for end users. Since the HTTP protocol does not maintain state between one page request and the next, a website must keep track of end users between requests as if they were in a dedicated session, like somebody on a very long phone call, with a continuous give and take between the end user and the website. In reality, the HTTP protocol essentially behaves like a series of disconnected phone calls, but through the magic of cookies, it is possible to maintain state and trick the end user into believing that they are actually having a dedicated conversation with the website. For example, the end user’s browser might first make a phone call to the website requesting the HTML for a particular webpage and then all of the necessary files like the .jpg and .gif files that form the images on the webpage and little JavaScript programs that are required for the HTML to render properly. The end user’s browser then hangs up while the website server responds to all of these requests. For the next webpage that the end user requires, the end user’s browser once again makes another phone call to the website server for another HTML page and all of its associated files. As you can see, if the website is trying to help the end user fill a shopping cart and place an order, there must be some mechanism to keep track of the thousands of concurrent end users who are simultaneously making such requests. This is accomplished by dropping a session cookie on the end user’s browser. The session cookie identifies the end user for the duration of the total transaction, which might require many webpages to accomplish. Session cookies are short-lived cookies that usually disappear when you close your browser or timeout after a few minutes of inactivity on your part. Tracking or persistent cookies, on the other hand, last much longer and are used to identify end users from session to session so that the website experience can be customized for the end user. For example, you might use a weather website that remembers your hometown and how you like your homepage laid out when you login, and so the weather website automatically displays the forecast for your hometown in the manner you like when you login to the website. This is accomplished by dropping a persistent cookie on your browser. So websites do not actually “remember” you, instead they distribute their “minds” out upon the end user community by dropping cookies on individual browsers. Unfortunately, tracking cookies can also be used by spyware and other forms of malware to monitor your Internet activities. Your virus and malware protection software can be used to help identify such cookies and is again an example of the need to adopt an Intentional Stance when dealing with software that really does have a set of beliefs, goals, and desires that are not in your best interest. So websites do indeed respond to stimulation, behave in a manner worthy of the Intentional Stance, and do spread their “minds” out into cyberspacetime.

Now if end users can think of websites as “thinking” agents, it is even more true for the IT professionals who create and maintain them. As a member of the Middleware Operations group for my current employer, I constantly find myself adopting the Intentional Stance when dealing with the software that I support. For example, last week I got pulled into an install that was not going very well. Our MidOps Offshore group in Bangalore India was having problems installing a very large Websphere .ear file. For J2EE Appservers like Websphere, .ear files are used to install Applications into a particular Websphere JVM that then create dynamic HTML for a particular website. Because this was a foreign website which had already seen the Sun set for the day and most of its end user community depart, its maintenance window just happened to include a Friday afternoon for me, and I had a ton of last-minute change tickets for the weekend to proofread and approve. Frantic programmers were calling my IP phone, leaving messages that I could not listen to, and popping instant messaging sessions on me while I was desperately trying to troubleshoot the install problem. The root cause of the problem was that the filesystem that Websphere was trying to deploy the .ear file to ran out of disk space, a very unusual problem since this critical filesystem for Websphere is normally sized with quite a bit of extra disk to avoid such problems. But this time it was not. This was further complicated by the fact that this was a low-usage website that had the Websphere Deployment Manager and a Websphere Cell with a single node all running on the same server, an unusual affair for most of the Websphere applications that MidOps supports. By the time I joined the call, there were apparently several residual orphan Unix processes from previous install attempts trying to write to the filesystem. At one time the Unix df command showed the filesystem at 100% disk, so I deleted out some old .ear files to make room, but unknown to me, other orphans must have been still trying to write to the filesystem and maxing it out. This resulted in numerous strange and aberrant behaviors by the Websphere Console. At first when I tried to login to the Websphere Console, I got the login page OK, but when I actually tried to login, I got an HTTP 500 error. I restarted the Websphere Deployment Manager a couple of times, but that did not help. What was happening was that the Deployment Manager was running OK, but it could not log my login attempt to the Websphere Console because the filesystem was at 100% disk utilization at the time. Deleting some old .ear files freed up some disk space and fixed the problem so that I could at least login to the Websphere Console. But when I tried to install the big .ear file, the Websphere Console lied to me and told me that the .ear file was not a proper .ear file and might be corrupt! That’s when it was noted that the filesystem had gone to 100% disk utilization again. This time UnixOps was engaged to increase the filesystem to 1 GB, and after that the .ear file installed properly, or at least it seemed so at first. But it turned out later that the Websphere Deployment Manager was out of sync with the Websphere node because of the filesystem going to 100% disk utilization, so the new .ear file had not been properly deployed. Resyncing the Websphere Deployment Manager with the Websphere node finally fixed the problem.

All during this install turmoil, I kept thinking of the Websphere Deployment Manager and Websphere node as an unruly child pulling a tantrum in a grocery store checkout line just to get its way. I kept thinking to myself, “What is wrong with you? Why are you behaving in such a bratty manner? Did I do something wrong? What do you really want? What will it take to make you stop acting like this?”. This was a rather embarrassing moment, as all parents can attest to because there were several other people on the install call listening to me trying to discipline my unruly child, all with the smug attitude that bystanders in such situations are infamous for. At one point I even threatened to reboot the Websphere server, the hollow threat that all IT professionals resort to, but infrequently follow through upon, but even that threat did not scare Websphere into submission! I am sure that this scenario is quite familiar to all IT professionals, and that we all routinely adopt an Intentional Stance towards the software that we create and support, and assign to it a personality of its own that we frequently try to bargain with in a vain attempt to get it to behave properly.

Comments are welcome at scj333@sbcglobal.net

To see all posts on softwarephysics in reverse order go to:
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/

Regards,
Steve Johnston